Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He'd been warned this was possible.

Though it was treated at most a courtesy notice, slipped in amongst everything else that came with his anointed position, because long had any dimension ever sought to bring a Ghost King to their door when Pariah Dark had been what ruled the throne. It was so far fallen out of favour that no one seemed particularly worried it would ever occur again.

It took time, after all, for news to circulate across a span of endless dimensions.

Danny had gone through every archive he could get his hands on with Sam and Tucker anyway, of course. They had to understand the how, the why, the what. Worst self-appointed history assignment ever (he thought those days were long behind him) but a little too critical to simply ignore and sweep under the rug. They were a trio of friends who lived with contingency plans readied at every corner. Getting yoinked away because someone wanted his opinion or input could simply throw the world's largest wrench into just… so many matters he had to deal with now.

So, despite how 'far-fetched' it was supposed to be in likelihood (hah, yeah, he'd never be so fortunate) Danny at least had some level of expectation to its procedure.

But this?

This felt in every way wrong to a call of the likes he'd been advised. This came more as an irrefutable demand as it scored out lines reeking of ill-intent into the space beneath his feet, allowing him no more than one harrowing second to glance across the hall to Pandora – the two of them en route to diffuse a small council meet of Observants – and mouth a half-baked what?

Her mirrored shock behind reaching hands was all he saw before falling through the space between realms.

A dizzying array of sigils raced the walls of what seemed like a fluctuating, spectral tunnel, speeding by too fast to read and yet having the gall to pull him straight ahead into their agreements.

Phantom twisted against the force, demanding it to stop and slow down and just wait a damn minute because hey no he did want to read the fine print, actually! Only the kaleidoscopic effect lashed back, enveloping and constricting and white hot in its vice, and he realized oh. This was trouble.

It pulled and shifted from everywhere it bit into him, demanding size and form of a different caliber and Phantom was quite simply bent into obliging. He wasn't the make of what this summons defined for him, yet he was forced to shape into it regardless. That wasn't how this worked. It was wrong. Wrong for it to be so in control. Disoriented and nauseous, his core screamed against the brutalizing insult pitted against him. A ghost's self and identity was everything.

It fucking hurt to be so twisted up. But Danny was a willful creature, and one of his best traits was adaptability under pressure.

He fought to move in a body made giant and utterly foreign to himself, dragging against weight that ghosts just didn't carry to escape the burning portal he'd been so rudely hauled through. Hitting the doorway at its end was almost a relief. He pulled himself through the tear between realms as if he were a demon emerging from Hell. Ugh. Talk about undignified. He may as well have been born naked and aflame while he was at it.

He pushed up from elongated limbs, half formed hands spasming between claws to fingers and back again as he rose up around a body that was just far too serpentine. The blindingly bright edge of the ritual borders needled every part of his corporealed flesh that pressed too close.

It was only once he'd climbed far enough to force a hip clear through, the beastly leg that followed digging for purchase against churning portal edge, that Danny realized too late the entire space wasn't big enough.

His head cracked the cavernous ceiling, stalactites raining down his shimmering, void cloaked shoulders as the coldfire ice of his materialized Crown flared against his skull in sharp reprimand. Phantom felt the guttural hiss jump from chest to throat, its travel long and the words he intended lost in a churn of static. Hey. Was he not even given a tongue? Dude. The rest of him poured through with a heave as unceremonious as an unclogged drainpipe, the sensation of a trailing tail in his wake drawing on for so long he began questioning if it was infinite.

He emptied into the world with too much expanse in his being, acutely aware of the problem he was about to run into.

When he hit the walls of the circle Danny near lost his mind.

Pure survival instinct sucked his reeling existence inwards, the shudder in his core akin to a desperate beast screaming as it clawed his everything back towards itself, fighting to shrink and compress and compact against a force that would not let him. His body curled and writhed through a thousand coils, melting and sloughing away what parts it couldn't remove fast enough from the violent, unmaking sensation.

Clawed hands gouged over stone floor as he shuddered, the shriek in his maw shattering the atmosphere in fractals of ice - ice that further exploded when they too struck the burning barrier surrounding him.

The white noise he'd become sizzled away only once he was no longer in contact with the border. He was still too cramped, too wrapped around and around himself to move without risking it all over again, and with bitter anger Danny cottoned on that this was by design.

Forced into something so large and unwieldy, and barely given the room to exist without destabilizing agony.

Bent in such awkward angles and too many restrictive turns, he merely turned his eye to the gathering of figures far, far below, disgustingly aware of the large orb rolling in his too-tangible skull as he did.

Silence finally filled the cavern, punctuated by an echoing drip.

Drip.

Drip.

A repulsive grin split the face of one hood-shadowed figure who stepped forward onto a stone podium with arms raised in a welcoming gesture. Danny's awareness zeroed in as if he'd overlayed the scene with a magnifying glass, able to distinguish the flat mole at their jaw, the crook of their canine tooth, the gleam against barely emerging next-day stubble.

Of all dimensions, realities, realms, and beings within to dare… maybe he shouldn't be surprised. All versions of Earth raised arrogance, indeed.

"Ghost King!" They cried, voice intermixed with pride, awe, and thrill as it reverberated through the chamber. "Our revered Pariah. We thank you, for your induction to servitude."

The moonlit scales Danny had been given raised on their ends, their rattle spanning out like rain on metal taken to a cacophonous extreme. The frozen air that gushed from his maw perfectly accentuated his derisive scoff.

Yet his scathing and brilliantly witty remark about their mistake bounced off the dark walls in a churn of senseless static to his own ear.

His face contorted into a frown, the awareness of his form still jarring. The teeth beneath his lips were sharp and many. His jaw was stretched too long, and his mouth indeed empty of a tongue, but he did not need any of that to speak the language of ghosts…

The man only grinned wider.

"You are not permitted to speak. You are bound to us here, under our rules, and we have been thorough in their holding."

Danny's eye slid upwards, rolling over the sickly swirl of the ritual that surrounded him. Beyond the cavern walls was but a muffle to his hearing. So too was his sense of smell deeply lacking – another denial for their control – but there was a hint of fresh death that was unmissable.

For him to catch it at all, he thought, indicated it was abhorrently pungent.

But the plateau this collective stood around was devoid of any sacrificial dead. He'd always dreaded the sight, knowing what it would mean to be called… but this was almost worst. What had been their payment?

The man below shunted back their hood, articulating his words with gestures that spoke tell he had spent many of his hours preaching. His assurance and arrogance in the face of all this was grating as he continued, unfazed.

"You are here to come to our accord. We will grant you the means of destruction, the claim upon souls for your forces, all the conquest you'd have desired. I assure you, Pariah, we will see eye to eye on our endeavours. You will find your new position can still be dignified."

Danny caught it, then. A whisper that was actually a wail, felt more than he heard. Hundreds. Thousands. And the horrified throes of an old city-spirit screaming for their loss, crumbling away like dust to their End without its people. It was flooding in from above, intricately channeled down through leys of scripture. It was spiraling around and around and around him within binds of law and rule and claim.

They were the threads that filled this array and meant to string him like a puppet. These insane freaks had sacrificed an entire city to carve this path into their hand.

Did they even know of the spirit they killed alongside them?

Pure vitriolic fury erupted from his core, exploding out his form with the ferocity of a star's collapse. Rage burned around his fist, wherever that was now within his fabric of self, Ring and Crown an amplifier of his horror-grief-guilt-anger-fury-wrath-hate as he lunged.

Awareness left him the instant he hit the walls.

It took a moment. It felt like an eternity.

He was strewn apart and torn asunder, yet the circle meticulously dragged him back together, stitching him piece by piece into the shape it demanded of him once again.

Danny couldn't help but groan, entire form quaking in the aftermath as he felt more like a puddle of goo splattered across the floor.

Fuck.

That… that was humbling.

"Y... You cannot break this. You cannot defy your order. Your folly will be turned back on you twice over." A waver lay rooted in the tone. Danny wished it nothing but the worst as he gingerly shifted himself around, reduced to petulance as his senses remained sluggish to recover. The speaker was shaken despite their proclamations. His display had intimidated them. Danny finally drew his spotting focus back across his audience.

It wasn't mere intimidation. A number of members, still spread across their meticulous summoner placements, had their hands clamped against their ears, noses, eyes – bleeding from burst vessels in various manners.

They'd probably thought they were protected. Honestly? Danny had thought the same. Basic containment sigils 101 (duh). He reined in his surprise, skimming the floors for its writ in detail, sassing them in his voiceless static to mask the act and clarifying his mood with a deeply curdled, bone-shaking growl for good measure.

Three of the members shifted on their feet, erring back on a note of caution. Danny clocked the movement with... curious interest.

The rites were numerous and indeed thoroughly detailed in their overlaps, and yet...

The man that had been leading the speech started up again, steadily regaining his momentum as their prize stayed quiet and seemingly cowed by their effective defenses.

Danny ignored him.

He pressured the room with his core-song instead, gently peeling back the courteous shroud he held over it to shield the Realms from the full brunt of his existence. He punctuated his growing echoes with whipping cracks of irritated-displeased-furious-disrespect.

The ritual's glow intensified, evidently barring his effect- but… there. On the far edge, another member wavered on their feet.

Somewhere. Somehow. There was a crack.

Okay.

Think.

To be here, like this, and so big… All things of the universe needed energy. Needed fuel to churn its molecular dance. He was twisting into one that was admittedly grotesque in its demand, but he wasn't the one copping the entire tax for it. He'd be barely left to think straight if he was, surely.

He would be useless to them if he was not trickle-fed in some form to maintain all this. Neither could he be so mulishly stitched back together without the means to mend him readily available.

And Danny mended best with ectoplasm.

It had taken him a moment, dizzied and stretched out as he was, to hear the faint chirrup for what it was, even now that he was looking for it.

A pinhole, in the center of his prison. A whisper of a line, no thicker than a spider's thread.

Maybe if he wasn't so empathetic to the song of his Realms and its people, he wouldn't have heard it at all.

(And maybe if there weren't thousands of agonized souls in suspended limbo, newly formed and desperately seeking an entrance, the Zone wouldn't be reaching for them too)

It seemed like a glaring error, really. But no, it was an inevitable compromise. He just wasn't supposed to notice it. They couldn't completely cut him off from his domain if they wanted him able to use it for their gains.

Sucks for them, because oh boy was he about to use it.

A wicked grin slowly peeled across his face. He was about to do something potentially - and quite possibly even incredibly - stupid.

For Danny, as previously established, was a willful creature.

The cultist faltered in his prattle at the abrupt shift in attitude, then stuck up his chin in defiant accomplishment.

"Our mission pleases you, then. You will comply."

Danny pivoted his focus down, latched onto his target, and pulled.

It wasn't kind, and it wasn't gentle. Yet he pulled for the Infinite Realms with such intense certainty that he convinced it of something ridiculous.

That teeny tiny sliver between them? Oh yeah, it could fit.

The world cracked with a shattering crunch, reality splitting to an ugly wound beneath his hands. The entire realm shifted as if it were no more than a picture frame, distorting across his vision in the arching lace of splintered glass as it fractured to his pressure.

In the second sickening crunch that followed, that tearing line ferned out akin to a lichtenberg scar.

The tear in reality stayed exactly in place across his vision, moving with it as Danny looked down upon the cultists once more. Some had not survived the fracture - their existence torn and suspended in ways he could line them up to match the fragments he peered through. The rest lay sprawled and seizing as they failed to comprehend the raw, bleeding wound they now witnessed and begun bleeding its reflection through themselves in infinite repetitions.

But the lead man, who had spoken his spiel for far too long... him, Danny had deigned to cushion from such harm.

Phantom was pissed enough to make a point.

He glared upon the ritual's sheen, continuing to call the Infinite Realms up between his palms until it folded over and spread the familiar shade of the Ghost Zone through the cracks that carved across the dimension, now overlayed against the wall that dared detain him.

The Infinite Realms were his, though, and would never refuse him passage. Danny reached out for the fracture now filled with ectoplasmic green and was welcomed as he slipped from one realm to the other and out again. The tethers and strings snapped behind him as he left the circle's hold, unravelling onto the other side in the formal shape and raiment he'd have preferred to be addressed under – starlight hair alight and swaying, the deep void of space draped across his shoulders to scatter the light of galaxies in his wake. His feet settled silently upon cold, rough ground, and the Living World held its breath around him.

He turned upon the man, now stood rooted in gasping terror and quailing under the face of his demise.

"You are mistaken," Danny said with sickly sweet charm, the cold frost cascading upon them in waves of deadly promise. "I am Phantom, King of the Infinite Realms. I cannot be contained."

And he did not want this one granted anywhere within his domain.

Chapter Text

(eye of the storm eye of the storm ohhh you're in danger)

A grasp on the wound's concept where it maintains the same visual across all perspectives. Trippy! Shatter inducing! Bad for your health.

Not featured however: shattered remains of cultists also looking like visual glitches

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When you're tryna keep your cool and grit-smiling through it, but oh boy is some fool about to get smacked

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